Every day I encounter yet another hamfisted pseudoacademic propaganda operation eagerly churning out oceans of text to shore up the German political establishment.
This is so parallel to U.S. taxpayers funding the National Institutes of "Health" and the National "Public" Radio propaganda machine that I can't even find it funny. Around the world people in "democracies" are taxed to pay for absurd, misleading and destructive projects like this that are contrary to their interests and well being because the Left has a death grip on institutions and the comfortable Right refuses to do anything about it. How to stop it? Thanks for the reminder Eugyppius.
The left sees power as the key to seizing more power. The right thinks power is something unpleasant utilized only for the duration of fixing a problem. The right thinks that the left has the same good intentions and it is just a matter of reasoning, compromise and persuasion. The left responds to attempts to reason with them using gaslighting, diversions, weapon words, and ultimately violence.
Plus the left gaslights itself. They may lie but only to reach a greater truth. We know masks don't work, but the fear it induces minimizes spread etc.
I believe more are waking up to the reality. And the reality will have to be the clear-minded taking power and then using it bluntly and directly.
"The left sees power as the key to seizing more power. The right thinks power is something unpleasant utilized only for the duration of fixing a problem."
That's what it's going to take, I think. I suspect that a *lot* of the permanent bureaucracy is going to need to become a lot *less* permanent, as well.
"We're shutting this entire agency down. You're all fired." And then legislatively salt the earth. Repeal the law authorizing their existence, repeal all the laws that they administered, sack all of their regulations, pass laws making regulations more difficult to pass, There's probably more.
Not that I think this will come to pass. The *concept* of the permanent bureaucracy is still far, far too entrenched in the minds of the congress. And if they actually tried to wield their power like that, the intelligence community would probably kneecap all of them.
Yeah, OK, I guess I'm pretty blackpilled these days. *sigh*
You will have to take on the government/NGO complex as well. Democratic sovereignty has been leached almost entirely from elected, accountable, government to a hidden, shadow government of crazies and fanatics.
I have the cure - for America first, then everywhere else. It took fifteen years to research, ponder, debate and revise. Now it is out. https://a.co/d/5bZcNyo
I would love everyone to read it and debate it. We can win this battle but we need to get focused the way The Left has been. We need to fight to shrink Leviathan.
Sadly, that's part of why we ended up where we are.
Warmek's Wishlist To Fix the US:
#1: Dump the bureaucracy. For all the reasons stated, plus it's going to be even more important with...
#2: Change the terms of office for the house to 4 years. Limit to 2 terms like the president. (Yes, this requires a constitutional amendment, which is OK because we're going to need more than one of those for...)
#3: Dump the 17th Amendment, and put the Senate back under the controls of the States like it's supposed to be.
#4: The Supreme Court is set at a capacity of 9 members, by Amendment.
#5: Nobody can go straight from Congress to the Presidency. One term in time-out first.
#6: Nobody can go straight from Congress or the Administration to a job with a company that makes more than 25% of its annual income from government contracts. One term in time-out here too.
#7: Passing a law requires a 70% approval in both houses. Repealing one requires 30% in both houses.
#8: Every bill presented for a vote must be read, out loud, by the sponsors, in total, before the vote can take place.
#9: Prune the hell out of the Intelligence Community.
And one that I think would be good, but might *really* not pass Constitutional muster even as an Amendment:
#10: The Congress is forbidden to anyone whose primary profession is as a lawyer. i.e.: No more lawyers as legislators. On the flip side, the creation of a Judicial Advisory Committee for the Congress whose sole purpose is to examine legislation before a vote and advise on the Constitutionality of the bill in question. Their recommendations are not binding. The Judicial Branch cannot be placed above Congress in their own bailiwick. But anything that they recommend against, that Congress passes anyway, can be fast tracked to the Supreme Court without needing to fiddle-fuck around in lower courts for a decade.
I don't even need you to vote for me. Just read my book. I have the cure - for America first, then everywhere else. It took fifteen years to research, ponder, debate and revise. Now it is out. https://a.co/d/5bZcNyo
Citizenship is not about writing letters to elected officials or voting some good person into office.
Citizenship is about the Ratification or Annulment of each line of every law, rule, regulation and supreme court decision on the books or that is on the docket waiting to be turned into law, policy and taxes.
Nothing short of this is going to ameliorate the situation for the body politic.
During the 1992 Presidential campaign, Ross Perot observed that: "a general lack of accountability among elected officials and those in the bureaucracy is the one specific reason that the people of America suffered…. and our only means of correction is to inspect their work and hold them accountable.”
Mr. Perot went on to note that this can easily be done with computer programs.
He called it: THE ELECTRONIC TOWNHALL.
“It is only logical that it will become our Fourth Branch of Government”, he said.
'Ross Perot observed that: "a general lack of accountability among elected officials and those in the bureaucracy is the one specific reason that the people of America suffered…. and our only means of correction is to inspect their work and hold them accountable.”'
Yet we walk down the street and everyone asks, how can we get a new bridge. Fix pot holes. Better schools and Childcare. Everything they are talking about for the last year did not make my list of important issues.
«Yet we walk down the street and everyone asks, how can we get a new bridge. Fix pot holes. Better schools and Childcare»
Pay for them. It is that easy. But the middle class either have real estate gains as their number one priority, or else want the upper class to pay for them, but they really push back, or the working class to pay for them, but they are tapped out paying for those real estate gains.
Magazines and newspapers, even if they only exist in e-format, can apply for subsidies from the state (tax money). But only if the publication is judged to follow certain values.
No, not objectivity or impartialness or even correctness of its reporting.
It must demonstrate that it complies with our local equivalent of DEI/ESG, in how it reports the news.
Kicker: we've had this system for generations. This is the reason SvD (Svenska Dagbladet, "Schwedishes Tageblatt") which is the high-end morning paper here, can receive hundreds of millions of crowns in subsidies every year, despite being owned by multibillion-corporation Schibsted.
Meanwhile, Samnytt, short for Samhällsnytt ("Gesellschaft Nachrichten", roughly translated) which is a small paper, run by about half a dozen people, gets zero.
Reason being, Samnytt doesn't pixelate the faces of migrant criminals. To not do so violates human rights.
Mussolini would be so proud of Germany (and Sweden): state, unions, party, church, business and banks - all incorporated into a single unit. As would the french founders of the idea of synarchism (french fascism, more or less).
On those grounds he'd be proud of the US, too. We skipped the goose-stepping part and went with soft fascism. For now. It always ends the same way, though.
What do you think was the fatal turning? I'm glad you wrote "generations" because the crazy people we have now are products of parents and grandparents and great-grandparents. They didn't spring full-grown from the armpits of now.
I don't think there's a single moment (for Sweden that is). I think that every step followed logically from every immediately preceding one, towards the immediate next one.
Lack of foresight.
Initially, the press-subsidies came about to ensure that no-one would be able to monopolise the media market simply due to being rich enough to do so (which capitalists did in the 19th century).
When the Socialist Democrat party started losing power in the 1970s (meaning they no longer netted +50% of the vote) they started adding-on conditions and riders with direct political bent.
When the internet broke the monopoly of the corporate and state media here, more and more conditions were added, and now they are for real debating pre-publishing censorship.
To Defend Our Democracy and Safeguard the Equality of All Humans - that is the actual reason given.
I had an extremely illustrative experience when my kid was in the elementary grades at a private school serving an international multicultural population. After man years of the parents' association being in the control of one faction of parents--all of whom were devoted to international multicultural peace and understanding and a liberal worldview--an upstart Indian single mother professional ran for president of the PA. All hell broke loose, to the extent even that the school's principal, pissed that I was one of the supporters of the upstart lady, called my now-unhusband at his work number to express some subtly--well, not so subtly--threatening observations that had nothing to do with the elections. And he in turn put great pressure on me to abandon my support for the upstart lady. And the thing was, the threatened possibilities could have absolutely destroyed us.
All for a damned parents' association election. And that's just exactly how people are when you put 'em together in groups bigger than, say, three.
I accept losing - if the context or situation is such that I don't or can't, I don't play the game at all.
That's a personal choice on my account: play the game means respecting the rules, and accepting you might lose. If you can't handle that, then you shouldn't play, is my thinking.
What creates the situation you describe is people thinking they are somehow fated or ordained to win, rule, control, what have you - they don't respect that (the legitimacy of) their position and power is conditional on them respecting the rules in the first place.
And that in turn stems from how we were raised - some parents lay down a rule: no candy on schooldays f.e. and then follow the rule themselves to set a good example. Other parents explain that the rule only applies to the kid, and why. And yet others simply opt for "Do as you're told!".
Having been in more parent-teacher and PTA-meetings than is safe for one's mental health, I do feel I have empirical data enough to claim the above as true. I almost can see the scenes you describe, they are that familiar.
Citizenship is not about writing letters to elected officials or voting some good person into office.
Citizenship is about the Ratification or Annulment of each line of every law, rule, regulation and supreme court decision on the books or that is on the docket waiting to be turned into law, policy and taxes.
Nothing short of this is going to ameliorate the situation for the body politic.
During the 1992 Presidential campaign, Ross Perot observed that: "a general lack of accountability among elected officials and those in the bureaucracy is the one specific reason that the people of America suffered…. and our only means of correction is to inspect their work and hold them accountable.”
Mr. Perot went on to note that this can easily be done with computer programs.
He called it: THE ELECTRONIC TOWNHALL.
“It is only logical that it will become our Fourth Branch of Government”, he said.
I have the cure - for America first, then everywhere else. It took fifteen years to research, ponder, debate and revise. Now it is out. https://a.co/d/5bZcNyo
I would love everyone to read it and debate it. We can fight back but we need to get focused.
You could start a web page that focused on the federal budget / cash flow statement which would get people focused and fighting back.
Why wait?
*How to make money with your website.*
Take the most egregious situation, law, grant, program, non competitive bid or policy you can find and parse it with AI into questions regarding its particulars.
Post: *The Questionnaire* on your web site.
Charge the voters, your patrons, one $ to vote on it.
Have the same AI take the patrons demographics and congressional district and post that too. This will show how many educated women are against abortion, and how many successful businessmen are in favor of DEI.
Have the AI post the results in real time and send results to the respective councilman, commissioner, judges, congressman, state representative, senator and governor!!
One Questionnaire should earn you many thousands of dollars per month and AI can do it for you!
This is sort of off topic, but Stephen KIng said "the road to hell is paved with adverbs," and now that Reverend Rainbow Gregor Samsa (or his many tentacled globalist puppeteer) has made pronouns part of his revision of Title IX, we could say "the road to hell is paved with pronouns." We used to have to diagram sentences on the chalkboard, but that, plus cursive, civics and American government, biology and the humanities, except for revisionist histories, are no longer taught, soit is really no wonder that these freaks can get away with torquing and twisting what little understanding people have of governmental structures and founding documents. I don't know if Germany is the same, but here in the US, we have intelligence shill Katherine Maher, now head of NPR, government funded media, saying (from Christopher Rufo's X account)
EXCLUSIVE: Katherine Maher says the "the number one challenge" in her fight against disinformation is "the First Amendment in the United States," which makes it "a little bit tricky" to censor "bad information" and "the influence peddlers" who spread it.
These psyops are getting really really sophisticated. But Humanity bats in the bottom of the ninth, as Dr. Aaron Kheiraty says, and, "the owl of Minerva flies at dusk," (Hegel) and "the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom" William Blake Nonetheless I wish them all a place in the hell of humidity and mosquitos and Mantovani and rice cakes and kale and tofu, in the circle where grotesques knaw on the basal ganglia of fraudsters.
You can take it as certain that we have our own equivalents of Katherine Maher (recognise the name from Chris Bray's Substack) in Germany and Sweden and any other western nation.
And they all say virtually the same things, the same week. What a coinky-dink.
Control language means controling thoughts, that's the core of deconstructionism and postmodernism and can be (and is) applied as tool to shape humans.
Check this out, if you're interested in how our authorities behave:
Yes, but the well meaning do-gooders don't ever see their deeds as evil. At worst necessary, but never evil. Even mass murderes claim that at heart they are not bad people. These days no evil-doer needs to claim that they are simply misunderstood - plenty in society are ready to do it for them.
But not the express lanes. Those are paved with Democrat Governance.
I have the cure - for America first, then everywhere else. It took fifteen years to research, ponder, debate and revise. Now it is out. https://a.co/d/5bZcNyo
The Epoch Times ran a long series a couple years ago describing how it was introduced in the first public schools in major cities. Slowly. A drop at a time, the window moved to let the Marxists in.
Everyone who writes/publishes anything has an agenda. "Agenda" itself is a neutral word. It's always the particular details that matter.
The Washington Times was founded and continues to be owned by the Unification Church.
Being against leftist idiocies doesn't mean that one does not have idiocies of one's own. Finding honest brokers anywhere for anything is not an easy hunt.
Well thanks for the heads up, I didn’t know anything about them other than reading their articles from time to time, but there is so much propaganda everywhere as you say it is difficult to find honesty anywhere without a slant. Why I love reading Eugyppius and many of the commenters, you included… learn so much. Sad I was asleep for most of my life, believing my government had the people’s best interests at heart, feeling pretty much like the fool now.
Wow that is amazing and just another clue as to what we're living through:
The billionaire class and its NGO army have conquered our political and business classes, along with the lapdog press and an academic class that would sell their own mamas to be called an "expert" on TV, and they have created a Potemkin democracy where everything appears the same before, unless you decide to express an unapproved opinion or vote for an unapproved candidate.
It is brilliant in its own creepy way, a silent coup by the managerial class that only us freaks here on the outer edges of the internet even notice, a new self-created self-funded Church/State ruling coalition, where both money and virtue are privatized and civil society gets moved behind their velvet rope.
I think what holds these petty tyrants together, on both sides of the Atlantic, is the idea they express every day in every way, even if implicitly: what's the point of having all this money, influence, these gilded degrees and credentials if we can't tell the plebs what to do and if they have the power to dethrone us?
The object of power is power. The point of being rich is being richer than others.
That is the nature of power, and of riches.
It is what you, I and they /choose/ to do with our power and our riches that is the issue.
Which is why everything is spoken of in the passive and in the collective voice - to rationalise away that it is a (moral) choice that underlies all actions taken or refrained from being taken.
If voting yet another passel of billions to Zelensky is an individual choice, that also means responsibility amd that in turn means culpability. If it is instead made out to be according to some outside force mandating it as "the only right choice", moral-wise, then the one voting thusly can claim (for himself at least) to be only following orders.
Few things scare us more than realising that every thing we do, every action we take, is on us. Not gods, not aliens, not anything but us. Inventing a totem to hand over the responsibility of will and power to, alleviates the sense of guilt and responsibility, of regret and remorse, and of fear and self-loathing, which may come from making choices.
We are essentially and fatally dual creatures, half solitary Selves trapped in our bodies, its needs and weaknesses, and our subjectivity; half social beings who live and die with our tribes, whose brains are constantly extending antennae to check who's up, who's down, what I need to do/say to get ahead, what I need not to do/say to make sure I don't get murdered (and how I can maybe score a wife).
The burden of freedom is enormous, especially when you pile atop it the knowledge of our mortality and ultimate irrelevance. Thus we cling to someone or something, trying our best to be godly in public while in private (including the privacy of our skulls) tending to all our beastly needs and schemes, money, sex, safety etc.
Oddly enough the people who've never once contemplated this seem to have the best lives! (And we call them politicians and journalists ;))
Have you ever read Becker's "Denial of Death"? Becker calls movements, ideologies, religions (even your fave baseball team) "immortality projects", some way to cast off our finite individuality and meld with something larger and more eternal. Is worth reading.
*The burden of freedom is enormous, especially when you pile atop it the knowledge of our mortality and ultimate irrelevance. Thus we cling to someone or something, trying our best to be godly in public while in private (including the privacy of our skulls) tending to all our beastly needs and schemes, money, sex, safety etc.*
... and to know that we are in the, or are the vanguard for humanity is humbling and yet empowering.
"This destiny does not tire nor can it be broken, and its mantle of strength descends upon those in its service."
Pro-NATO, pro-war, pro-Israel (and I mean pro-Israel in the way AIPAC is), pro-taxbreaks for corporations and the richest people, pro-regulation and pro-fees and pro-neoliberalism and pro-multiculturalism (but not where their journalists live, of course), and so on - think WaPo and NYT adopting MSNBC.
And among our mainstream papers, it is considered right-of-centre and conservative. That should tell you where our left-leaning papers are.
I mean, *I'd* be pro-NATO... if we (the USA) weren't *in* it anymore.
I'm pretty Pro-Israel, though I don't know if I'm pro-Israel in that manner.
Taxbreaks for corporations only makes sense. Corporations don't pay corporate taxes. Ever. At all. The customers of corporations pay corporate taxes. It's basically impossible for that to be any other way.
I'm in favor of taxbreaks for the rich as well. But I'm also in favor of tax breaks for the poor and the middle class. On the other hand, I also want a really weak government that does almost nothing at all, so...
I'm definitely *not* pro-regulation and pro-fees and pro-neoliberalism and pro-multiculturalism.
That paper does not strike me a particularly "conservative". Just neo-feudalist. No wonder the State supports it.
Tax breaks as in certain corporations doesn't have to pay their power bills. Or that they get 100% refund of any VAT they pay. Tax breaks no-one else can get.
I'd rather see taxes lowered than having to apply for "travel expenses reimbursement" every time we file our taxes - just lower all the taxes relating to driving! The more rules, the more loopholes.
The main left-wing paper, Aftonbladet (approx. "Evening Leaflet"), is pro-palestinian, anti-Trump, anti-USA, pro-Democrats (Hillary, Obama, Biden), anti-Russia, anti-NATO, pro-islamic, pro-migration, pro-homo, pro-tranny, anti-prison, anti-cops (unless it's female and/or migrant cops), pro-Greta, anti-lowered taxes, anti-cars, pro-taxes, pro-socialisation, pro-censorship, anti-jewish (it has several times published texts alleging that the IDF harvest organs from palestinians), and a lot more vile bile.
The reason it's so schizo here with the papers and their political orientation on issues is, political parties used to own their own papers and this lives on in some papers still eing under de facto party control.
So if the party changes tack on an issue, so does the paper. Sometimes literally as obvious as "We have always been at war with Eastasia".
Plausibility is somewhat subjective – what sounds plausible to them, isn't necessarily plausible to everyone. The higher they climb in their ivory towers, the less they're able to propagandize common folks.
"- iterative – stirring said s** over until you come up with something remotely plausible"
Or, like a COVID PCR test, running it enough times that the process overwhelms its inputs, so that on any dataset whatsoever your preferred results will always emerge.
Can't all of political philosophy be boiled down to "we'll do anything to keep the other guys from winning?"
And--when you graduate too many people with no useful life talent, the only way to ensure continued revenue stream for universities is for governments to hire their product. Those graduates will do everything possible to ensure they aren't culled by an unfriendly change in political environment.
My two paragraphs are related of course. The guys writing all those books on political philosophy have no useful life talents either.
It is a pretty brilliant masterstroke by the billionaire class to hire our infantile screen-addled academic/media class to act as their Praetorian Guard and let them compete to be official holders of the Imperial chamberpot. All you have to do is cut them a small check, give them some important sounding title, and tell them they're "fighting to make the world a better place" along with maybe humming a few bars of John Lennon's "Imagine"—flatter people about their virtue and brilliance, pump them full of fear and hatred of the Other who always lurks on the edge of town, and you can get them to do anything.
When has this ever not been true? What empire has not done this? Don't let the current tech distract you from the age-old pattern. It's just fancy scratchy tools-on-potsherds, in the interwebs age instead of by hoof.
i'm caught here bw my beliefs in Ecclesiastes "no new thing etc" and that all societies are pyramids run by some species of aristocrat whose first aim is to always keep his place at the apex secure VS my perhaps nostalgia-fueled memories of the first 3 decades of my life in 20th century America, where there seemed to be much more intellectual and cultural freedom and there wasn't a mandatory package of orthodox beliefs you had to profess under duress to go to school, get a job, publish a book, score a date etc.
maybe i'm just craving some noblesse oblige instead of being ruled by a Calvinist Karenocracy? everything's a matter of degree!
now that i think of it, i think the main difference is IDEOLOGY.
it's one thing to have orthodox beliefs (no person, family or society could survive without them), and measured doses of filial piety and patriotism make life sane and healthy, but IDEOLOGY is a weapon that introduces a sharp-edged Friend/Enemy distinction into every sphere of life, from art to love to what's for dinner.
the billionaire class' new super-weapon is IDEOLOGY, in this case the weird mix of neoliberalism and identitariansm that I call Social Justice Inc, and this ideology now functions like an electrified fence to hoard power and attack opponents.
Ideological societies are toxic, repressive, low-trust and highly dishonest a la Havel's Green Grocer.
An ideology is nothing more than a religion with religious rules/laws, where the concept of god(s) is absent; instead, the ideology itself becomes the godhead.
This is also the reason that the more malleable an ideology is to the will of and will to power (compared to its starting conditions), the more succesful it is.
Christianity suited the late Roman Empire perfectly as a tool for subjugation of the masses and of unruly neighbouring peoples - this does not in any way mean the ruling class didn't believe, didn't have faith, quite the opposite. It just means that the new cult out of Palestine made it possible to gather more power and control under the state.
Monopoly capitalism, corporativism, synarchism, and communism all hold ideological ideals which appeals to those already in power, therefore they are succesful. Doesn't mean the objective material metrics indicate succes, and that's not how an ideology is measured; it is, just like a religion, measured after how tightly and well dogma is adhered to.
If millions starve, or the economy flounders due to interest being banned is inconsequential if dogma and doctrine has been adhered to; since the divine creed/ideological rule-set has been followed, any objective metric being "in the red" is simply explained as people not adhering to the rules enough.
Just look at the Covid-response (masking, especially) for a recent example.
What do you think the medieval Church was, with its often illiterate or barely literate monks in their multitudes spreading the party line? Only the higher levels of Church hierarchy were even able to read the Bible.
"Can't all of political philosophy be boiled down to "we'll do anything to keep the other guys from winning?"'
No.
If democracy means more than voting, it means every participant voluntarily respecting a set of values such as free and fair elections, freedom of opinion (and the attendant rights relating to freedom of expression), the right to hold meetings and organise (unions f.e.) and a lot more.
But core and key is everyone participating respecting this, and accepting that they may lose.
It is the lack of respect for that, that kills democracy every time.
Few people have ever in real life respected any principles that risk the other guys winning. No one actually likes democracy in true operation. Courts often operate to thwart the will of the majority when that majority will is deemed wrong.
People in real life hate freedom of opinion. Every time a Substacker otherwise loved and trusted by his readership writes something they haven't expected to come from him, many of them will react with shock, disappointment or anger. And that readership is reading in the first place because they've fled from mainstream media in the desperate hunt for a truthful voice.
This is why I dislike philosophy so much. It serves to obscure truth.
That only proves those people are normal, psychologically speaking: they seek belonging, the way a child seeks the parent.
And when parent "breaks the rules" according to the reader, they lash out and throw a tantrum.
The mindset you describe isn't looking to learn, it is looking for affirmation and confirmation. To use religious language, it has thrown down its old idol and raised up a new one.
Only to be disappointed when Umbalaga the Thunderer doesn't bring the rain either.
If the Verfassungsblog believes that Texas (where I live) is under the control of "authoritarian populists", they are so ignorant that they should not be believed in anything else that they say.
Greg Abbot (our governor) is hardly populist and certainly not authoritarian. The state is run largely by and for the interest of the oil companies, which of course are also major employers with broad popular support. Although we've had a few sops to the people, especially through entirely reasonable and unfortunately limited action with respect to the border, during covid days Texas happily had masks mandates and more for six months. And although the governor made a lot of noises about preventing vaccine mandates, many doctors or nurses that wanted to reject the covid vaccines were in fact either fired or forced to take it. The state did not intervene, even though the people here did not support these mandates.
eugyppuis, the reunification is not beginning to resemble a neocolonial project: it was a carpetbagging project from the start! The parallels with the US Reconstruction are obvious and the persistence to this day of a deep North-South divide in US politics adumbrates the future of Germany.
A few years ago a written rationale for seeking public office attributed to Pat Buchanan was proffered to Ukrainian voters as the work of one of their own candidates for the same.
After reading it I concluded that it had been machine/AI written to appeal to people who read. That is, the story was human, the reader invested his time ... and magically made up his mind on whom to cast his sacred and democratic vote.
“ The AfD must be deprived of any chance to influence the makeup of the judiciary.”
The irony of it all. Germany and your “lib’s” must be the doppelgänger of ours. Here, our Leftist party, the Democrats, decry how Trump politicized our Supreme Court. There is now a 6-3 split between the Conservatives on the Court and the Leftists. Their proposed “solution” is to expand the Court (as soon as the Democrats obtain a favorable majority again in Congress) by 4 more Justices. Funny number, 4, just what’s needed to overrule the current 6 “conservative” Justices on split decisions. Seems the Leftist definition of democracy depends solely upon who’s in the majority control in the Federal government.
These people have only one single belief, on both sides of the Atlantic: their gilded educations and credentials, their pure and virtuous hearts, their enlightened altruistic "compassion" and "tolerance", their obvious moral and intellectual superiority compared to the unwashed plebs and their creepy churches and backwards beliefs like national borders, gives them the divine right to rule unimpeded, in all spheres of existence, and anyone who disagrees is a dangerous "far right" extremist who needs to be destroyed.
This is so parallel to U.S. taxpayers funding the National Institutes of "Health" and the National "Public" Radio propaganda machine that I can't even find it funny. Around the world people in "democracies" are taxed to pay for absurd, misleading and destructive projects like this that are contrary to their interests and well being because the Left has a death grip on institutions and the comfortable Right refuses to do anything about it. How to stop it? Thanks for the reminder Eugyppius.
How to stop it?
---
Seize power and be willing to weld it. That's what the Left do. The Right are His Majesty's Loyal Opposition, and useless.
It is all about power, nothing else.
The left sees power as the key to seizing more power. The right thinks power is something unpleasant utilized only for the duration of fixing a problem. The right thinks that the left has the same good intentions and it is just a matter of reasoning, compromise and persuasion. The left responds to attempts to reason with them using gaslighting, diversions, weapon words, and ultimately violence.
Plus the left gaslights itself. They may lie but only to reach a greater truth. We know masks don't work, but the fear it induces minimizes spread etc.
I believe more are waking up to the reality. And the reality will have to be the clear-minded taking power and then using it bluntly and directly.
"I believe more are waking up to the reality. And the reality will have to be the clear-minded taking power and then using it bluntly and directly."
Again, correct!
"The left sees power as the key to seizing more power. The right thinks power is something unpleasant utilized only for the duration of fixing a problem."
Correct.
That's what it's going to take, I think. I suspect that a *lot* of the permanent bureaucracy is going to need to become a lot *less* permanent, as well.
"We're shutting this entire agency down. You're all fired." And then legislatively salt the earth. Repeal the law authorizing their existence, repeal all the laws that they administered, sack all of their regulations, pass laws making regulations more difficult to pass, There's probably more.
Not that I think this will come to pass. The *concept* of the permanent bureaucracy is still far, far too entrenched in the minds of the congress. And if they actually tried to wield their power like that, the intelligence community would probably kneecap all of them.
Yeah, OK, I guess I'm pretty blackpilled these days. *sigh*
You will have to take on the government/NGO complex as well. Democratic sovereignty has been leached almost entirely from elected, accountable, government to a hidden, shadow government of crazies and fanatics.
I have the cure - for America first, then everywhere else. It took fifteen years to research, ponder, debate and revise. Now it is out. https://a.co/d/5bZcNyo
I would love everyone to read it and debate it. We can win this battle but we need to get focused the way The Left has been. We need to fight to shrink Leviathan.
I'd vote for you!
I *have* joked about running for office in '28. Man, but I'd *really* hate the job...
That already makes you more suitable than anyone else.
Sadly, that's part of why we ended up where we are.
Warmek's Wishlist To Fix the US:
#1: Dump the bureaucracy. For all the reasons stated, plus it's going to be even more important with...
#2: Change the terms of office for the house to 4 years. Limit to 2 terms like the president. (Yes, this requires a constitutional amendment, which is OK because we're going to need more than one of those for...)
#3: Dump the 17th Amendment, and put the Senate back under the controls of the States like it's supposed to be.
#4: The Supreme Court is set at a capacity of 9 members, by Amendment.
#5: Nobody can go straight from Congress to the Presidency. One term in time-out first.
#6: Nobody can go straight from Congress or the Administration to a job with a company that makes more than 25% of its annual income from government contracts. One term in time-out here too.
#7: Passing a law requires a 70% approval in both houses. Repealing one requires 30% in both houses.
#8: Every bill presented for a vote must be read, out loud, by the sponsors, in total, before the vote can take place.
#9: Prune the hell out of the Intelligence Community.
And one that I think would be good, but might *really* not pass Constitutional muster even as an Amendment:
#10: The Congress is forbidden to anyone whose primary profession is as a lawyer. i.e.: No more lawyers as legislators. On the flip side, the creation of a Judicial Advisory Committee for the Congress whose sole purpose is to examine legislation before a vote and advise on the Constitutionality of the bill in question. Their recommendations are not binding. The Judicial Branch cannot be placed above Congress in their own bailiwick. But anything that they recommend against, that Congress passes anyway, can be fast tracked to the Supreme Court without needing to fiddle-fuck around in lower courts for a decade.
*ramble ramble*
I don't even need you to vote for me. Just read my book. I have the cure - for America first, then everywhere else. It took fifteen years to research, ponder, debate and revise. Now it is out. https://a.co/d/5bZcNyo
I would love everyone to read it and debate it.
Superb comment, Warmek. Right on the money.
Citizenship is not about writing letters to elected officials or voting some good person into office.
Citizenship is about the Ratification or Annulment of each line of every law, rule, regulation and supreme court decision on the books or that is on the docket waiting to be turned into law, policy and taxes.
Nothing short of this is going to ameliorate the situation for the body politic.
During the 1992 Presidential campaign, Ross Perot observed that: "a general lack of accountability among elected officials and those in the bureaucracy is the one specific reason that the people of America suffered…. and our only means of correction is to inspect their work and hold them accountable.”
Mr. Perot went on to note that this can easily be done with computer programs.
He called it: THE ELECTRONIC TOWNHALL.
“It is only logical that it will become our Fourth Branch of Government”, he said.
'Ross Perot observed that: "a general lack of accountability among elected officials and those in the bureaucracy is the one specific reason that the people of America suffered…. and our only means of correction is to inspect their work and hold them accountable.”'
Excellent. I regret not having voted for Perot.
"It is all about power, nothing else."
Correct.
Yet we walk down the street and everyone asks, how can we get a new bridge. Fix pot holes. Better schools and Childcare. Everything they are talking about for the last year did not make my list of important issues.
«Yet we walk down the street and everyone asks, how can we get a new bridge. Fix pot holes. Better schools and Childcare»
Pay for them. It is that easy. But the middle class either have real estate gains as their number one priority, or else want the upper class to pay for them, but they really push back, or the working class to pay for them, but they are tapped out paying for those real estate gains.
Great comment. All true.
Sounds like here in Sweden, 100%.
Magazines and newspapers, even if they only exist in e-format, can apply for subsidies from the state (tax money). But only if the publication is judged to follow certain values.
No, not objectivity or impartialness or even correctness of its reporting.
It must demonstrate that it complies with our local equivalent of DEI/ESG, in how it reports the news.
Kicker: we've had this system for generations. This is the reason SvD (Svenska Dagbladet, "Schwedishes Tageblatt") which is the high-end morning paper here, can receive hundreds of millions of crowns in subsidies every year, despite being owned by multibillion-corporation Schibsted.
Meanwhile, Samnytt, short for Samhällsnytt ("Gesellschaft Nachrichten", roughly translated) which is a small paper, run by about half a dozen people, gets zero.
Reason being, Samnytt doesn't pixelate the faces of migrant criminals. To not do so violates human rights.
Mussolini would be so proud of Germany (and Sweden): state, unions, party, church, business and banks - all incorporated into a single unit. As would the french founders of the idea of synarchism (french fascism, more or less).
On those grounds he'd be proud of the US, too. We skipped the goose-stepping part and went with soft fascism. For now. It always ends the same way, though.
What do you think was the fatal turning? I'm glad you wrote "generations" because the crazy people we have now are products of parents and grandparents and great-grandparents. They didn't spring full-grown from the armpits of now.
I don't think there's a single moment (for Sweden that is). I think that every step followed logically from every immediately preceding one, towards the immediate next one.
Lack of foresight.
Initially, the press-subsidies came about to ensure that no-one would be able to monopolise the media market simply due to being rich enough to do so (which capitalists did in the 19th century).
When the Socialist Democrat party started losing power in the 1970s (meaning they no longer netted +50% of the vote) they started adding-on conditions and riders with direct political bent.
When the internet broke the monopoly of the corporate and state media here, more and more conditions were added, and now they are for real debating pre-publishing censorship.
To Defend Our Democracy and Safeguard the Equality of All Humans - that is the actual reason given.
No one accepts losing.
I had an extremely illustrative experience when my kid was in the elementary grades at a private school serving an international multicultural population. After man years of the parents' association being in the control of one faction of parents--all of whom were devoted to international multicultural peace and understanding and a liberal worldview--an upstart Indian single mother professional ran for president of the PA. All hell broke loose, to the extent even that the school's principal, pissed that I was one of the supporters of the upstart lady, called my now-unhusband at his work number to express some subtly--well, not so subtly--threatening observations that had nothing to do with the elections. And he in turn put great pressure on me to abandon my support for the upstart lady. And the thing was, the threatened possibilities could have absolutely destroyed us.
All for a damned parents' association election. And that's just exactly how people are when you put 'em together in groups bigger than, say, three.
I accept losing - if the context or situation is such that I don't or can't, I don't play the game at all.
That's a personal choice on my account: play the game means respecting the rules, and accepting you might lose. If you can't handle that, then you shouldn't play, is my thinking.
What creates the situation you describe is people thinking they are somehow fated or ordained to win, rule, control, what have you - they don't respect that (the legitimacy of) their position and power is conditional on them respecting the rules in the first place.
And that in turn stems from how we were raised - some parents lay down a rule: no candy on schooldays f.e. and then follow the rule themselves to set a good example. Other parents explain that the rule only applies to the kid, and why. And yet others simply opt for "Do as you're told!".
Having been in more parent-teacher and PTA-meetings than is safe for one's mental health, I do feel I have empirical data enough to claim the above as true. I almost can see the scenes you describe, they are that familiar.
Well, see, you are a healthily-matured person. You had your reasonably wild youth and then you grew up.
You are a rarity, statistically-speaking. And, like, here we are, worldwise.
Citizenship is not about writing letters to elected officials or voting some good person into office.
Citizenship is about the Ratification or Annulment of each line of every law, rule, regulation and supreme court decision on the books or that is on the docket waiting to be turned into law, policy and taxes.
Nothing short of this is going to ameliorate the situation for the body politic.
During the 1992 Presidential campaign, Ross Perot observed that: "a general lack of accountability among elected officials and those in the bureaucracy is the one specific reason that the people of America suffered…. and our only means of correction is to inspect their work and hold them accountable.”
Mr. Perot went on to note that this can easily be done with computer programs.
He called it: THE ELECTRONIC TOWNHALL.
“It is only logical that it will become our Fourth Branch of Government”, he said.
I have the cure - for America first, then everywhere else. It took fifteen years to research, ponder, debate and revise. Now it is out. https://a.co/d/5bZcNyo
I would love everyone to read it and debate it. We can fight back but we need to get focused.
You could start a web page that focused on the federal budget / cash flow statement which would get people focused and fighting back.
Why wait?
*How to make money with your website.*
Take the most egregious situation, law, grant, program, non competitive bid or policy you can find and parse it with AI into questions regarding its particulars.
Post: *The Questionnaire* on your web site.
Charge the voters, your patrons, one $ to vote on it.
Have the same AI take the patrons demographics and congressional district and post that too. This will show how many educated women are against abortion, and how many successful businessmen are in favor of DEI.
Have the AI post the results in real time and send results to the respective councilman, commissioner, judges, congressman, state representative, senator and governor!!
One Questionnaire should earn you many thousands of dollars per month and AI can do it for you!
Ergo the expression "The road to hell is paved with good intentions."
I tend to argue that the road to Hell is paved with evil deeds, it usually serves to upset well-meaning do-gooders.
(Not implying you are one, mind!)
This is sort of off topic, but Stephen KIng said "the road to hell is paved with adverbs," and now that Reverend Rainbow Gregor Samsa (or his many tentacled globalist puppeteer) has made pronouns part of his revision of Title IX, we could say "the road to hell is paved with pronouns." We used to have to diagram sentences on the chalkboard, but that, plus cursive, civics and American government, biology and the humanities, except for revisionist histories, are no longer taught, soit is really no wonder that these freaks can get away with torquing and twisting what little understanding people have of governmental structures and founding documents. I don't know if Germany is the same, but here in the US, we have intelligence shill Katherine Maher, now head of NPR, government funded media, saying (from Christopher Rufo's X account)
EXCLUSIVE: Katherine Maher says the "the number one challenge" in her fight against disinformation is "the First Amendment in the United States," which makes it "a little bit tricky" to censor "bad information" and "the influence peddlers" who spread it.
These psyops are getting really really sophisticated. But Humanity bats in the bottom of the ninth, as Dr. Aaron Kheiraty says, and, "the owl of Minerva flies at dusk," (Hegel) and "the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom" William Blake Nonetheless I wish them all a place in the hell of humidity and mosquitos and Mantovani and rice cakes and kale and tofu, in the circle where grotesques knaw on the basal ganglia of fraudsters.
You can take it as certain that we have our own equivalents of Katherine Maher (recognise the name from Chris Bray's Substack) in Germany and Sweden and any other western nation.
And they all say virtually the same things, the same week. What a coinky-dink.
Control language means controling thoughts, that's the core of deconstructionism and postmodernism and can be (and is) applied as tool to shape humans.
Check this out, if you're interested in how our authorities behave:
https://www.mpf.se/psychological-defence-agency
Yes, but the well meaning do-gooders don't ever see their deeds as evil. At worst necessary, but never evil. Even mass murderes claim that at heart they are not bad people. These days no evil-doer needs to claim that they are simply misunderstood - plenty in society are ready to do it for them.
But not the express lanes. Those are paved with Democrat Governance.
I have the cure - for America first, then everywhere else. It took fifteen years to research, ponder, debate and revise. Now it is out. https://a.co/d/5bZcNyo
I would love everyone to read it and debate it.
The Epoch Times ran a long series a couple years ago describing how it was introduced in the first public schools in major cities. Slowly. A drop at a time, the window moved to let the Marxists in.
The Epoch Times, organ of Falun Gong? Pots, kettles, mirrors...
I was unaware of this… is the Epoch Times not what it seems?
Everyone who writes/publishes anything has an agenda. "Agenda" itself is a neutral word. It's always the particular details that matter.
The Washington Times was founded and continues to be owned by the Unification Church.
Being against leftist idiocies doesn't mean that one does not have idiocies of one's own. Finding honest brokers anywhere for anything is not an easy hunt.
Well thanks for the heads up, I didn’t know anything about them other than reading their articles from time to time, but there is so much propaganda everywhere as you say it is difficult to find honesty anywhere without a slant. Why I love reading Eugyppius and many of the commenters, you included… learn so much. Sad I was asleep for most of my life, believing my government had the people’s best interests at heart, feeling pretty much like the fool now.
That is correct.
Epoch Times is another neocon/zionist shill for the tiny hostile foreign power that controls American media.
It's worse than that--it's the Falun Gong meshed with zionists.
The Epoch Times, begun and devoted to the Falun Gong, has a huge Israeli/zionist connection.
They have Israeli investors, Israeli editions, Israeli writers. All global stories are told through a zionist lens.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/dorlevinter/?originalSubdomain=il
https://www.linkedin.com/in/eyal-levinter-0b097340/?originalSubdomain=il
Oh. You didn't know. I'm absolutely in favor of the Japanese having their own ethnic homeland.
So you’ve never read an edition of the Epoch Times, but you’ve prejudged it because of what you’ve been told by your overlords?
Yes. I am a thrall of my overlords.
Wow that is amazing and just another clue as to what we're living through:
The billionaire class and its NGO army have conquered our political and business classes, along with the lapdog press and an academic class that would sell their own mamas to be called an "expert" on TV, and they have created a Potemkin democracy where everything appears the same before, unless you decide to express an unapproved opinion or vote for an unapproved candidate.
It is brilliant in its own creepy way, a silent coup by the managerial class that only us freaks here on the outer edges of the internet even notice, a new self-created self-funded Church/State ruling coalition, where both money and virtue are privatized and civil society gets moved behind their velvet rope.
I think what holds these petty tyrants together, on both sides of the Atlantic, is the idea they express every day in every way, even if implicitly: what's the point of having all this money, influence, these gilded degrees and credentials if we can't tell the plebs what to do and if they have the power to dethrone us?
The object of power is power. The point of being rich is being richer than others.
That is the nature of power, and of riches.
It is what you, I and they /choose/ to do with our power and our riches that is the issue.
Which is why everything is spoken of in the passive and in the collective voice - to rationalise away that it is a (moral) choice that underlies all actions taken or refrained from being taken.
If voting yet another passel of billions to Zelensky is an individual choice, that also means responsibility amd that in turn means culpability. If it is instead made out to be according to some outside force mandating it as "the only right choice", moral-wise, then the one voting thusly can claim (for himself at least) to be only following orders.
Few things scare us more than realising that every thing we do, every action we take, is on us. Not gods, not aliens, not anything but us. Inventing a totem to hand over the responsibility of will and power to, alleviates the sense of guilt and responsibility, of regret and remorse, and of fear and self-loathing, which may come from making choices.
We are essentially and fatally dual creatures, half solitary Selves trapped in our bodies, its needs and weaknesses, and our subjectivity; half social beings who live and die with our tribes, whose brains are constantly extending antennae to check who's up, who's down, what I need to do/say to get ahead, what I need not to do/say to make sure I don't get murdered (and how I can maybe score a wife).
The burden of freedom is enormous, especially when you pile atop it the knowledge of our mortality and ultimate irrelevance. Thus we cling to someone or something, trying our best to be godly in public while in private (including the privacy of our skulls) tending to all our beastly needs and schemes, money, sex, safety etc.
Oddly enough the people who've never once contemplated this seem to have the best lives! (And we call them politicians and journalists ;))
Have you ever read Becker's "Denial of Death"? Becker calls movements, ideologies, religions (even your fave baseball team) "immortality projects", some way to cast off our finite individuality and meld with something larger and more eternal. Is worth reading.
*The burden of freedom is enormous, especially when you pile atop it the knowledge of our mortality and ultimate irrelevance. Thus we cling to someone or something, trying our best to be godly in public while in private (including the privacy of our skulls) tending to all our beastly needs and schemes, money, sex, safety etc.*
... and to know that we are in the, or are the vanguard for humanity is humbling and yet empowering.
"This destiny does not tire nor can it be broken, and its mantle of strength descends upon those in its service."
Francis Parker Yockey
"Svenska Dingbat"? :D :D :D
Oh yes, by Crikey!
Pro-NATO, pro-war, pro-Israel (and I mean pro-Israel in the way AIPAC is), pro-taxbreaks for corporations and the richest people, pro-regulation and pro-fees and pro-neoliberalism and pro-multiculturalism (but not where their journalists live, of course), and so on - think WaPo and NYT adopting MSNBC.
And among our mainstream papers, it is considered right-of-centre and conservative. That should tell you where our left-leaning papers are.
I mean, *I'd* be pro-NATO... if we (the USA) weren't *in* it anymore.
I'm pretty Pro-Israel, though I don't know if I'm pro-Israel in that manner.
Taxbreaks for corporations only makes sense. Corporations don't pay corporate taxes. Ever. At all. The customers of corporations pay corporate taxes. It's basically impossible for that to be any other way.
I'm in favor of taxbreaks for the rich as well. But I'm also in favor of tax breaks for the poor and the middle class. On the other hand, I also want a really weak government that does almost nothing at all, so...
I'm definitely *not* pro-regulation and pro-fees and pro-neoliberalism and pro-multiculturalism.
That paper does not strike me a particularly "conservative". Just neo-feudalist. No wonder the State supports it.
Tax breaks as in certain corporations doesn't have to pay their power bills. Or that they get 100% refund of any VAT they pay. Tax breaks no-one else can get.
I'd rather see taxes lowered than having to apply for "travel expenses reimbursement" every time we file our taxes - just lower all the taxes relating to driving! The more rules, the more loopholes.
The main left-wing paper, Aftonbladet (approx. "Evening Leaflet"), is pro-palestinian, anti-Trump, anti-USA, pro-Democrats (Hillary, Obama, Biden), anti-Russia, anti-NATO, pro-islamic, pro-migration, pro-homo, pro-tranny, anti-prison, anti-cops (unless it's female and/or migrant cops), pro-Greta, anti-lowered taxes, anti-cars, pro-taxes, pro-socialisation, pro-censorship, anti-jewish (it has several times published texts alleging that the IDF harvest organs from palestinians), and a lot more vile bile.
The reason it's so schizo here with the papers and their political orientation on issues is, political parties used to own their own papers and this lives on in some papers still eing under de facto party control.
So if the party changes tack on an issue, so does the paper. Sometimes literally as obvious as "We have always been at war with Eastasia".
I mean, I'm definitely one who wants to see taxes lowered universally. Taxation is theft.
> The main left-wing paper, Aftonbladet
Yeah... I'm really not going to get along with those people. They seem psychotic. ;)
"... one only recognises abuses when your opponent is in a position to take advantage of them."
Power for me but not for thee!
That's how power works. If it wasn't, it wouldn't be power.
Here's a little dictionary of social research slang to explain what it's about:
- qualitative – we have no quantitative data, or what we have is non-representative
- scenario analysis – making s**t up
- iterative – stirring said s** over until you come up with something remotely plausible
They're in fact admitting they're making propaganda.
This is well said. However, it does not need to be remotely plausible it turns out. Just using lots of important sounding words.
Plausibility is somewhat subjective – what sounds plausible to them, isn't necessarily plausible to everyone. The higher they climb in their ivory towers, the less they're able to propagandize common folks.
If I could “like” 100 times, I would have!
"- iterative – stirring said s** over until you come up with something remotely plausible"
Or, like a COVID PCR test, running it enough times that the process overwhelms its inputs, so that on any dataset whatsoever your preferred results will always emerge.
Can't all of political philosophy be boiled down to "we'll do anything to keep the other guys from winning?"
And--when you graduate too many people with no useful life talent, the only way to ensure continued revenue stream for universities is for governments to hire their product. Those graduates will do everything possible to ensure they aren't culled by an unfriendly change in political environment.
My two paragraphs are related of course. The guys writing all those books on political philosophy have no useful life talents either.
It is a pretty brilliant masterstroke by the billionaire class to hire our infantile screen-addled academic/media class to act as their Praetorian Guard and let them compete to be official holders of the Imperial chamberpot. All you have to do is cut them a small check, give them some important sounding title, and tell them they're "fighting to make the world a better place" along with maybe humming a few bars of John Lennon's "Imagine"—flatter people about their virtue and brilliance, pump them full of fear and hatred of the Other who always lurks on the edge of town, and you can get them to do anything.
When has this ever not been true? What empire has not done this? Don't let the current tech distract you from the age-old pattern. It's just fancy scratchy tools-on-potsherds, in the interwebs age instead of by hoof.
i'm caught here bw my beliefs in Ecclesiastes "no new thing etc" and that all societies are pyramids run by some species of aristocrat whose first aim is to always keep his place at the apex secure VS my perhaps nostalgia-fueled memories of the first 3 decades of my life in 20th century America, where there seemed to be much more intellectual and cultural freedom and there wasn't a mandatory package of orthodox beliefs you had to profess under duress to go to school, get a job, publish a book, score a date etc.
maybe i'm just craving some noblesse oblige instead of being ruled by a Calvinist Karenocracy? everything's a matter of degree!
Please do not imagine things were not full of packages of orthodox beliefs in the golden years of our childhoods.
One might not have noticed them if one was of orthodox/mainstream beliefs.
now that i think of it, i think the main difference is IDEOLOGY.
it's one thing to have orthodox beliefs (no person, family or society could survive without them), and measured doses of filial piety and patriotism make life sane and healthy, but IDEOLOGY is a weapon that introduces a sharp-edged Friend/Enemy distinction into every sphere of life, from art to love to what's for dinner.
the billionaire class' new super-weapon is IDEOLOGY, in this case the weird mix of neoliberalism and identitariansm that I call Social Justice Inc, and this ideology now functions like an electrified fence to hoard power and attack opponents.
Ideological societies are toxic, repressive, low-trust and highly dishonest a la Havel's Green Grocer.
An ideology is nothing more than a religion with religious rules/laws, where the concept of god(s) is absent; instead, the ideology itself becomes the godhead.
This is also the reason that the more malleable an ideology is to the will of and will to power (compared to its starting conditions), the more succesful it is.
Christianity suited the late Roman Empire perfectly as a tool for subjugation of the masses and of unruly neighbouring peoples - this does not in any way mean the ruling class didn't believe, didn't have faith, quite the opposite. It just means that the new cult out of Palestine made it possible to gather more power and control under the state.
Monopoly capitalism, corporativism, synarchism, and communism all hold ideological ideals which appeals to those already in power, therefore they are succesful. Doesn't mean the objective material metrics indicate succes, and that's not how an ideology is measured; it is, just like a religion, measured after how tightly and well dogma is adhered to.
If millions starve, or the economy flounders due to interest being banned is inconsequential if dogma and doctrine has been adhered to; since the divine creed/ideological rule-set has been followed, any objective metric being "in the red" is simply explained as people not adhering to the rules enough.
Just look at the Covid-response (masking, especially) for a recent example.
What do you think the medieval Church was, with its often illiterate or barely literate monks in their multitudes spreading the party line? Only the higher levels of Church hierarchy were even able to read the Bible.
"Can't all of political philosophy be boiled down to "we'll do anything to keep the other guys from winning?"'
No.
If democracy means more than voting, it means every participant voluntarily respecting a set of values such as free and fair elections, freedom of opinion (and the attendant rights relating to freedom of expression), the right to hold meetings and organise (unions f.e.) and a lot more.
But core and key is everyone participating respecting this, and accepting that they may lose.
It is the lack of respect for that, that kills democracy every time.
Few people have ever in real life respected any principles that risk the other guys winning. No one actually likes democracy in true operation. Courts often operate to thwart the will of the majority when that majority will is deemed wrong.
People in real life hate freedom of opinion. Every time a Substacker otherwise loved and trusted by his readership writes something they haven't expected to come from him, many of them will react with shock, disappointment or anger. And that readership is reading in the first place because they've fled from mainstream media in the desperate hunt for a truthful voice.
This is why I dislike philosophy so much. It serves to obscure truth.
That only proves those people are normal, psychologically speaking: they seek belonging, the way a child seeks the parent.
And when parent "breaks the rules" according to the reader, they lash out and throw a tantrum.
The mindset you describe isn't looking to learn, it is looking for affirmation and confirmation. To use religious language, it has thrown down its old idol and raised up a new one.
Only to be disappointed when Umbalaga the Thunderer doesn't bring the rain either.
Yes exactly. Normal doesn't always mean good stuff.
I had already a lot of fun with these sick idiots. Result: I'm blocked.
hehe well done
Hmm, in a way, but now no one can read comments on their idiotic articles anymore.
Post them here. Some of us will post them as comments on their articles until we are blocked, too.
The Thuringen Project just shows the Iron Law of Woke Projection never misses.
Let´s call it "Thüringen Projection Project".
If the Verfassungsblog believes that Texas (where I live) is under the control of "authoritarian populists", they are so ignorant that they should not be believed in anything else that they say.
Greg Abbot (our governor) is hardly populist and certainly not authoritarian. The state is run largely by and for the interest of the oil companies, which of course are also major employers with broad popular support. Although we've had a few sops to the people, especially through entirely reasonable and unfortunately limited action with respect to the border, during covid days Texas happily had masks mandates and more for six months. And although the governor made a lot of noises about preventing vaccine mandates, many doctors or nurses that wanted to reject the covid vaccines were in fact either fired or forced to take it. The state did not intervene, even though the people here did not support these mandates.
I hoped my American readers would appreciate that little nugget.
eugyppuis, the reunification is not beginning to resemble a neocolonial project: it was a carpetbagging project from the start! The parallels with the US Reconstruction are obvious and the persistence to this day of a deep North-South divide in US politics adumbrates the future of Germany.
Anyone watch Redlettermedia's Best of the Worst on YouTube, reviewing terrible VHS tapes? Eugyppius is like Best of the Worst for politics.
Interesting, "authoritarian populist" is almost a contradiction in terms. See how much they have to destroy language to get their ideologies to work!!
Just substitute AfD for Republican or MAGA and you have the Democratic playbook for the US.
Exactly.
A few years ago a written rationale for seeking public office attributed to Pat Buchanan was proffered to Ukrainian voters as the work of one of their own candidates for the same.
After reading it I concluded that it had been machine/AI written to appeal to people who read. That is, the story was human, the reader invested his time ... and magically made up his mind on whom to cast his sacred and democratic vote.
“ The AfD must be deprived of any chance to influence the makeup of the judiciary.”
The irony of it all. Germany and your “lib’s” must be the doppelgänger of ours. Here, our Leftist party, the Democrats, decry how Trump politicized our Supreme Court. There is now a 6-3 split between the Conservatives on the Court and the Leftists. Their proposed “solution” is to expand the Court (as soon as the Democrats obtain a favorable majority again in Congress) by 4 more Justices. Funny number, 4, just what’s needed to overrule the current 6 “conservative” Justices on split decisions. Seems the Leftist definition of democracy depends solely upon who’s in the majority control in the Federal government.
This is Orwellian beyond belief. Do any of these people even listen to themselves?
That was a rhetorical question, because obviously they don't.
These people have only one single belief, on both sides of the Atlantic: their gilded educations and credentials, their pure and virtuous hearts, their enlightened altruistic "compassion" and "tolerance", their obvious moral and intellectual superiority compared to the unwashed plebs and their creepy churches and backwards beliefs like national borders, gives them the divine right to rule unimpeded, in all spheres of existence, and anyone who disagrees is a dangerous "far right" extremist who needs to be destroyed.
Dassit!
How nice of the Max Planck Institute & pals to write a playbook for the AfD. 😁
TLDR--
Mean Head Girls throw bitch fit.